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Social Selling is an exciting topic. As a sales professional, it means a new way to groom and find prospects. Social selling is another tool in the sales professional’s bag of tricks. A sales professional still needs a strong foundation of traditional sales techniques.

What is Social Selling and how do you incorporate it?

In the eyes of the traditional Outside Sales Professional, Social Selling is a way to groom prospects. Help move them through the buying decision using online platforms. The Sales Professional is always going to ask, how will this help me close sales today?Starting an email list is a basic way for a Sales Professional to begin Social Selling. The goal of Social Selling being to move prospects through the sales cycle. I see the email list as a very

Starting an email list is a basic way for a Sales Professional to begin Social Selling. The goal of Social Selling being to move prospects through the sales cycle. I see the email list as a very low-cost way to move prospects through your sales cycle.

You have control over the information your potential buyer sees. You can steer your potential buyer to online resources. Also, you have more constant contact with your potential buyers.

There’s no preventing a potential buyer from looking at competitors. An email list will provide a vehicle to connect with your potential buyers.

Why an Email List

With more of the buying decision occurring online, the Sales Professional needs to find a way to have their message in front of the buyer at an early stage. An email is a very low commitment item to get, and through emails, you can provide value and an effective message.

If your Sales Professionals are anything like me, then they will question the need to adopt new techniques. Usually, it comes from a place of will this help me make quota this quarter (or month).

The beautiful thing about an email list is most sales professionals already do some form of this. It is for an end of month promotional scramble to get a few extra orders.

The concept is to provide immense value to your potential buyers. The result is establishing credibility. Thus, you can ask for the sale. This is the power of the email list.

What This Means To Your Sales Cycle

The email list means you are constantly grooming your prospects for a sale. The goal of doing this through email is, as your prospects are doing their online research, you get your message in front of them at a critical stage.

The direct effect of this to your sales cycle is having full sales funnel. The full sales funnel will allow you to spend time creating engagement with your prospects. So, as you begin the purchasing process, you have a deeper relationship with the customer.

Actions To Take Today

A few steps you can take today are:

Today, you can craft an elegant email to all your contacts in your CRM or customer database. This initial email is to alert your prospects, customers, and contacts you will be sending them informative information about industry trends, company updates, and any other relevant information.

Send only one email alerting them of your newsletter.

After the initial email, you will want to remove any prospects that ask to be removed. The last thing you want is to get off on the wrong foot with your prospects and customers. Also, for the purposes of this email, it’s better to have your contacts needing to opt out rather than opt in.

At the beginning, a weekly newsletter would be a great frequency, which is not too Spammy. With this in mind, forcing the opt out is not unreasonable. This will retain more emails to your list, as the likelihood of an opt-out is low.

Once you have your list determined, a great starting point is to begin a weekly email newsletter. The newsletter should consist of industry topics that interest you (so you are consistent). Also, it needs to provide value to your prospects and customers.

This requires you have a deep understanding of your target market. Understanding the struggles of your customers and leads.

Once you are ready to send an elegant newsletter, the following resources can help.

Social Selling is a buzzword. I get the feeling, marketing fuels a lot of the discussion. Possibly sales professionals too. Social Selling is about cold calling strategy.

Why is there buzz around Social Selling?

For most sales professionals, social selling is a cold calling strategy. It’s for getting appointments. Making contacts and getting leads with potential customers.

When we look at social selling, we’re looking at how cold calling and prospecting is evolving. It is evolving to make this process more efficient.

The result when you’re in the field, you are in front of qualified prospects. This is how the role of the sales professional is changing.

The Old Cold Calling Strategy

Only a few years ago, my old cold calling strategy was to use the shotgun approach. I’m talking spray and pray. I would send mailers, fax blasts, drop off literature, call any phone numbers I had to get a name. Then, I would narrow my list down and target many individuals to try and get in front of them.

Why this strategy is working less and less is because potential buyers no longer need to listen to Sales Professionals. Sales Professionals aren’t the source of new industry information. All prospects need to do is Google their interest, and they get the most updated information.

Understanding this, Sales Professionals can now discuss different ways to get our message in front of our potential buyers. Also, we can determine how we are going to get in front of our potential buyers.

Why Is This Concept Important?

Potential buyers will ignore the Sales Professional until they are ready to buy. The potential buyer will not look at mailers. They will delete your voicemails. And they are ignoring your emails.

The result is needing to find a new way to get in front of potential buyers. Enter Social Selling. Or, more accurately, Social Cold Calling.

What does Social Cold Calling actually look like?

Social Cold Calling is utilizing social media outlets, email lists, as well as internet message boards, to get to your potential buyers. With the gatekeepers getting better, you need to determine how to avoid the gatekeeper.

First, you need to determine where people in your industry get information.

Next, you can get to them through a secretary, a colleague you know, or directly. The goal is to gain an introduction, and use social media and internet searches to do this.

Where Do You Begin

To use the Social Cold Calling technique, the best place to start is LinkedIn. Using LinkedIn you can search for your specific contact, the company your contact works for, and determine if your potential buyer has any similar connections.

The next place to search is places like Twitter. Also, industry job boards to see if potential buyers in your area are active in an online community. Using these techniques will separate you from the competition. They are far more cost effective methods for a cold calling strategy.

Social Cold Calling is going to become a larger part of the sales cycle. Especially as more people move online. No longer is Social Media a place to see what your friends did this past weekend.

It’s no secret the sales cycle is changing, and changing fast. Social Selling is a contributing factor.

The sales process is moving from in-person sales to digital sales. Digital purchasing is well developed in the consumer market. The B2B market is taking a bit longer to catch up. The B2B Sales Professional will also need to change.

One reason for the lack of transition could be mixing business and personal digital presence. Unfortunately, this change has more relevance as selling occurs online.

Another reason could be the complexity of social media and digital marketing. This should not scare Sales Professionals. Marketers have done a great job at surrounding Digital Marketing with complex jargon.

Today, we are going to look at what social selling is and how you can use it to prospect for new business.

What Is Social Selling?

Social selling is taking what you already do as a sales professional, sell, and move it online. Using social media platforms.

Selling has always been about communicating, being social, and personable.

Now, there’s a new medium. To put it simply, social selling is finding your potential customers on social media. Learning, connecting and presenting your company.

Unfortunately, Digital Marketers surround all aspects of social selling and digital marketing with jargon. This is good for job security. Though, for future Sales success, we need to decrypt the language.

Using social selling to improve our sales process.

Manage Your Digital Presence

As social media becomes integrated in the sales cycle and online research, a digital presence becomes a personal brand.

Information is public to employers, customers, and friends, so managing it can help create a personal brand.

It can be used to become an expert in your field, and no matter your business. Management of your digital presence is essential. And, it can be used to effectively generate prospects.

Where Are Your Customers?

The most important step in starting social selling is determining what platforms your customer’s use.

Before social media, if you were selling a medical device to a surgeon, you would not go to a coffee shop and expect to find them. You would make your way to the hospital. Where their office is.

The same concept applies to social media. Typically, a physician is not going to be doing product research on Pinterest. More likely they will be in a discussion forum on LinkedIn.

Thus, LinkedIn is the platform of choice.

Engagement

Once you have determined your customer’s location, it’s time to engage. This does not mean posting about your product.

Rather, engagement is joining conversations about trends in your industry. When you sit down for a sales call you don’t immediately pull out your product, say features and benefits, then expect to close the sale.

You need to build rapport, discover needs, then provide a solution. This is the process that, as a sales professional, we do every day. This is our skill set.

So, choose your social platforms and join the conversation. This will help build credibility and begin the sales cycle.

Social Selling is not about the hard close. Rather, it is integrating with the modern Buyers Journey.

These are all questions that we seem to be faced with when trying to build our digital brand.

The question you need to ask is: what platforms are your customers are on?

Then, engage with those platforms. A lot.

Most companies should be on Facebook, but not everybody should be on LinkedIn. Some on Google+ and others on twitter.

Once you’ve decided what platforms are best, then it is time to decide how to engage. In this post we are going to focus on how to manage your Google Plus page. It is a powerful engagement tool for a business page and can be useful for social selling.

Google+ is unlike other social media platforms and it takes some time to figure out and master.

There are features, such as hangouts, groups, and communities you can be a part of. To become engaged on Google+, here are a few topics to consider.

Then, decide how to manage your Google Plus page and presence.

What Is Google+?

Google+ is the social network that Google developed to compete with Facebook. It is a significantly more powerful tool for business.

Google+ allows you to follow and connect with your friends and colleagues and put them in to circles. These circles add layers that allow you to connect to different people for different subjects.

What this allows you to do is engage with individuals on a deeper level and in a more specific way.

Why Google+

Google+ is a part of Google.

Google+ will allow you to improve your search results, as well as connect your Google+ to your pages. This is powerful as it creates a seamless integration of your business pages on Google+ and your website.

Also, if you are utilizing Adwords, then you need Google+ to help maximize the efficacy of your Adwords campaign. Google+ will also allow people to +1 your page right from Google search results. This improves the search results of your pages.

Google+ will take some time to understand, but the metrics are very powerful.

How to Manage Your Google Plus Page

Google+ pages is a page for businesses.

As a Google+ user you will have a private account associated with your Gmail. Then a business account that will allow you to promote your business. If you are a business you will want to be a page, and in this way, you can converse with your potential customers.

This is the way you engage and start conversations about topics related to your industry.

Google+ Engagement

The engagement of Google+ is to set different people into different circles. Then, begin to engage with those individuals.

This engagement will allow you to have very specific conversations with customers and connections. This creates a deep level of engagement.

The engagement is to provide product feedback, enhance lead conversion, and keep a customer engaged. The result is more use of your products.